harmed by people who are continually lazy

There’s an old well-defined business principle called the 80/20 principle. 80% of the outcomes are driven by 20% of the causes. Going on a witch hunt for the one lazy employee is an enormous waste of effort, relative to simply guaranteeing a smooth and efficient workflow for the general staff. If the workplace is well-run, staff can be both lazy and productive. If everything is difficult and adversarial, even the most productive workers will fail to hit their marks.

There’s much less envy of success when people feel like it was earned or it’s something they could achieve if they worked hard.

People don’t envy success, they envy a disparity of results. Splitting your team arbitrarily into “Makers” and “Takers”, because one staffer outperforms another on a particular day or in a particular scale doesn’t encourage cohesion. It encourages backstabbing and animosity. Trying to pay people for individual performance in a team environment means you’re going to get a bunch of people fighting with one another to be First Place, rather than helping each other to hit a team goal.

Again, look to the Sears model and its failures. Compare that to, say, HEB where the whole store is rewarded when it hits a mark regardless of whether any single staffer falls above or below the pack.

On a sports team, anyone who can’t perform is let go.

There’s a lot of drama around athlete contracts regarding performance. But savvy agents know to include injury clauses that protect their players. That’s because the financial demand is to cut the player loose after injury, but the team demand is for the player to take risks in order to win the game.

You don’t want a situation like when the Longhorns played the Crimson Tide back in 2009, with star quarterback Colt McCoy just sitting his ass down at the start of the game in order to avoid injuries into his professional career.